What do you call it when two iconic street foods from different parts of the world collide? In the case of tacos árabes—a coupling of Arabic shawarma and Mexican tacos—you might say it’s culinary kismet.
The distinctive tacos sure taste as if they were meant to be. They start out impressively, with heaps of pork butt marinated in lime juice and Levantine spices and cooked on a sizable vertical spit called a trompo. The finished meat, at once succulent and charred, is carved from the rotisserie and tucked inside a yeasted flatbread called pan árabe. Then come the garnishes: drizzles of smoky-fiery chipotle sauce; a cooling salve of yogurt sauce; and onions, cilantro, and lime.
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Transnational Flatbread
When Arab immigrants settled in Puebla, Mexico, they created pan árabe—a hand-rolled yeasted flatbread that’s similar to pocketed pita—to hold the fillings for their tacos árabes. Pan árabe are cooked one by one in a skillet until soft and puffy and then folded around the filling like flour tortillas.
Paulette Schuster, PhD, author and scholar of food and identity, described the tacos as “a perfect combination of old and new worlds” when I got in touch with her to get the backstory. At the end of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, many Middle Easterners migrated to Puebla, Mexico, bringing with them the tradition of nestling spit-roasted lamb in pita and lavishing it with yogurt.
As so many dishes do, the shawarma evolved to accommodate regional tastes and ingredients. Because lamb was expensive and not much liked by the locals, the settlers adapted to use Puebla’s abundant pork. Embracing Mexico’s love of chiles, they included chipotle sauce along with the yogurt sauce and cradled the filling with pan árabe, a bread that’s similar to pita.
The Magic of the Trompo—and How to Mimic It at Home
In Puebla, the pork for tacos árabes is cooked on a vertical rotisserie called a trompo (“spinning top” in Spanish), so named because the compacted meat has the tapered appearance of the child’s toy. It’s a time-consuming, mouthwatering process: Pork butt is sliced thin and marinated, threaded onto a sizable skewer with pork fat and slivered onions, and then carved into a cone shape. As the rotisserie spins, fiery coals banked on either side lick the setup with flames, rendering the fat so it drips down and bastes the meat. Eventually, the pork at the center of the spit cooks to tender, juicy perfection while the exterior caramelizes and crisps. A master taquero is able to shave the meat so that each taco holds succulent and burnished portions. Our twice-cooked (braised then broiled) pork cooks up juicy and edged with char.
1. Braise to create tender, juicy meat.
2. Reduce cooking liquid for meaty glaze.
3. Broil glazed meat to create char; slice.
I didn’t have a trompo, but I really wanted to make the same juicy, unctuous pork at home.
A braise-then-broil technique worked best. After soaking thick slabs of pork butt in a blend of lime juice, toasted and cracked cumin and coriander seeds, Mexican oregano, and salt, I thinned the marinade with water, added garlic and sliced onions in a nod to their inclusion on a trompo, and popped everything into the oven.
After an hour, the pork was succulent and intensely flavored. To copy the trompo’s characteristic char, I reduced the braising liquid into a syrupy glaze and brushed it on top of the meat before sliding the slabs under the broiler.
Sliced into thin strips, the juicy, caramelized pork was ready to become a taco filling.
Pan árabe can be hard to source in the States, but small, pocketed pitas or flour tortillas are common, suitable stand-ins. And while the onion component is typically grilled, pickled, or raw, I chose to lightly sauté a thinly sliced onion to soften its sulfuric edge and produce a gentle crunch.
For the chipotle sauce, I blitzed an entire can of the smoky-hot chiles in adobo with sweet tomato paste, warm spices, and lime juice. Yogurt, toasted garlic, and more lime made up the refreshing yogurt sauce that was the final element of these special, serendipitous tacos.
Tacos Árabes (Pueblan Pork Tacos with Chipotle and Yogurt Sauces)
Tacos árabes—the Pueblan union of yogurt-sauced shawarma and chipotle-tinged pork tacos—combine food traditions from across the globe.
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